The big surprise is, of course, the Martin DEC. Martin County has only 25,615 Democrats (compared to 47,307 Republicans.) Raking in $20K is no small feat. It also demonstrates the potential of DEC fundraising. Now compare the Martin DEC to Broward's stats this quarter. Broward County has 480,689 Democrats (nearly 19 times that of Martin County) and was only able to rake in $9,903.00.

DECs have a long road ahead of them to build viable fundraising operations. Posts like this (every reporting period) are designed to let people within DECs know how well they are performing in relation to other counties. Its also great ammo for DEC fundraisers to use - "If Martin County with only 25,000 Dems can raise $20,000 - we can do that - and better."

Update 11:29am: Okaloosa comes in at a resounding $20,781.18. Osceola rakes in $1,852.97, and St. Lucie $4,199.88.

Update 2: A small handful of DEC people have been grumbling to FDP about this post. I thought that would happen. Let me just say that this post isn't intended to shame DECs. We all know that DECs tend to have big annual fund raisers which therefore don't necessarily show up in these Q2 numbers. This is only the first post of its kind. I will be posting summaries every quarter which will demonstrate progress.CrispAds Blog Ads

17 comments:

The difficulty in looking at DEC fundraising is that most of them tend to have a major fundraising event in the year...beyond that there is little active fundraising.

It looks like Martin DEC had their annual golf tournament, which accounted for their fundraising prowness.

If you check Broward's previous report, you'll see huge amounts for their annual Jefferson Jackson dinner.

Unfortunately DEC's for the most part haven't developed regular fundraising programs that try to develop regular donations from their members and instead rely upon highly inefficient major fundraising events.

I am proud to say that Alachua County's income this past quarter was NOT the result of a major fundraising event, but rather from an aggressive letter-writing and phone call fundraising drive. We've never tried this before, have in the past relied primarily on a fundraising dinner in the fall.

We complied a list of people from our county who contributed to Democratic candidates and/or the Party during the 2006 election cycle (available on the internet). The really big donors got phone calls from our Chair, the others received one of our fundraising letters. We were pleased to receive donations from a number of local Democrats that we had not heard from before.

I think hollyoak in Alachua is on to something. DEC fundraising needs to be more than just a once a year, "big party" thing - where more of the money goes to pay the venue than goes into the party's coffers.

But it takes a lot of work and dedicated fundraising and is very difficult to accomplish with the "party time" staffing at most DEC's.

I must say I really like what Alachua did...I wonder if other DEC's have had similar successes?

In Marion, we too once did two fundraising dinners - and that was it. We did one fundraising dinner at the beginning of this year (our Q1 was nearly $10K), but we used these opportunities to get people on our recurring donor program (The Winner's Circle) for sustained momentum. Many decided to pay off their pledges for the year, which helped contribute to a modest Q2 for us.

I really liked what Alachua did, and I would like to try something similar here in Marion. Of course, Alachua has a lot more donors to choose from, and a lot more big donors to boot. Nonetheless, its something worth trying.

I should also expand on the lack of big donors in Marion - you can probably count them all on one or two hands.

This is also the way it is in most of Florida's 67 counties.

If we had a large number of big donors to call - we would do it tommorrow.

The name of the game here is expanding the donor base so we can finance our operations properly as well as give our candidates something to go after.

During the Walker campaign last year, we faced that exact problem. James was more than willing to make the personal fundraising calls early on (OK, maybe with a little pushing on part, but he was ready), but there were so few people to talk to, we could zip through the whole "big donor" category in a day or two.

So for smaller counties, and those counties without a developed donor base, the idea is expanding the pool.

I don't think Lafayette is the only county lacking a DEC. Keep in mind, it has a population of only around 8,000 people and based on geography I'm going to assume they're mostly conservative, well that and the fact that its a dry county.

Don't be too sure that you don't have at least a few big donors in your counties. We were amazed at the level of donations from some of the Democrats in Alachua County. In many cases, although we knew them or at least knew of them, we had no idea they were such "good" Democrats! Some had had absolutely no contact with our local party in the past, despite our assumption that our mailing list of 5,000 or so voters surely included any potential donors. And I might add, I don't believe a single one of our "deep-pocket" Democrats flatly turned us down.

We are getting ready to send out a second wave of fundraising letters to people who have not yet donated, and this time we hope to follow the letters up with phone calls. We had intended on doing that with our first batch of letters, which we sent out in April, but we just didn’t get ourselves organized to do that. We are anxious to see if the follow-up phone calls will increase the level of response.

Unfortunately, many Democrats don’t realize that local parties get NO support from the state or national party. So that is one of the points we emphasize in our letters. We also of course do a little bit of “bragging” about all the great things we are doing, and point out how their donations can help us to reach out to even more Democrats in our community and ensure that we elect Democrats from the local level up to the Presidency.

We will continue to hold our annual Lawton Chiles Fundraising Event, because we all enjoy it so much. But we knew we had to do more.

I'll work on writing something up. Please know that we do not pretend to be "experts" at fundraising here in Alachua County. But we do admit to being ambitious! So we are trying some new things, and will learn as we go along!

People Who Make It Happen

About

If Democrats in Florida, and indeed around the nation, are going to continue to win elections and therefore promote good, progressive policies - we must have the infrastructure to win.

This blog is devoted to the ongoing conversation about the most critical element in this ever-increasingly complex puzzle: local Democratic organizations. In Florida, they're called Democratic Executive Committees, or DECs for short.

Without functional and effective DECs, its often very difficult if near impossible for Democrats to get elected, and indeed for our two-party system, and therefore democracy, to flourish.

So we welcome your ideas, comments, and occasionally your frustrations. Thanks for participating!